My first impressions of the device were that its has a small form factor, compact and nice to hold in the hand but a bit plastically. The screen is very bright and easy to see and the keyboard is lovely to use one handed. Comparing it with my Treo 750v its much slimmer and easily fits in your shirt pocket without you knowing its there. The phone has one feature over the Treo 750v that really stands out and that's the mini USB charging port on the bottom of the phone. As previous Palm owners know, we have had to suffer Palms proprietary charging connection for long enough so its a welcome addition to see this standard. On the downside anyone upgrading from a previous Palm device will not be able to use their old accessories like car chargers etc.
The battery is easily accessible and underneath you have the sim card slot and a slot for a micro sd card.
The phone is powered by Windows Mobile 6 Standard Edition with a few tweaks to make it more user friendly. Press the start button and a new menu system appears instead of the standard windows mobile fare, this consists of icons along the top that can be scrolled through for quick access to message center, favorite contacts, upcoming events, music and video, photos, vodaphone live etc. There is also a button to switch to the classic menu should you wish to do so.
One thing that really irritated me was the time it takes from switching the phone on to actually being able to use it, the home screen appears and its at least a further two minutes before any button presses would register, very strange.
There is the full version of mobile office, windows live messenger, clearvue PDF viewer, google maps and a very handy java ebay application that makes searching ebay a breeze.
Built into the device is a 256 Mb rom that has 158 meg free for storage which is very nice, this can be expanded further with a micro SD card and the ram is 64 Mb and when running I had about 28 Mb free for programs.
The Camera is an uninspiring 2.0 megapixel lens without a flash and I have taken a couple of sample pictures for you to see.
The phone has a GSM radio and supports 3G but no HSDPA and the signal strength seems stable and strong, 3G works fine in 3G areas and web surfing was fine and snappy Bluetooth paired easily with my Parrot 3200 car kit and voice clarity was good, I also tested the Bluetooth PAN with my laptop and again no issues and I was surfing using 3G straight away.
I set up Activesync with my mail server and within a few minutes all my contacts, diary and tasks were synched with the phone and push email just worked perfectly as it always does with Windows Mobile devices.
My Overall impressions of the Treo 500v are its a good smartphone but far from revolutionary, its very similar in form and function to the Dash with the added benefit of 3G and a much better keyboard for one handed typing.
Likes
- Small form factor
- Light weight
- Lovely Keyboard
- Mini USB Charging
- Ebay application
Dislikes
- Poor camera
- No HSDPA
- No Wifi
- 2.5mm headphone port
Platform
Windows Mobile® 6 Standard
Display
320x240-pixel Transflective colour screen; supports 16-bit colour (up to 65K colours)
Radio
GSM/GPRS/UMTS radio
GSM bands: 900/1800/1900
UMTS bands: 2100
Bluetooth® Wireless Technology
Version: 2.0 + EDR
Profiles: Headset, handsfree, EDR, serial and OBEX. Mono and stereo headsets are supported
Memory
256MB memory (150MB available user storage)
Camera
2.0 megapixels with 2.5x digital zoom and
video capture support
Battery
Removable 1200mAh, lithium-ion
Talk time: 10 days standby,
and up to 4.5 hours of talk time
Expansion
MicroSD card
Connector
mini USB
Dimensions
16.5mm (D) x 61.5mm (W) x 110mm (H)
120 grams
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